Paterson Photography Ltd.

Open House – It is that time of the year again for our spring open house. May 20 from 2 till 6 at our studio 1263C 2 Ave South. Stop in to see the new papers that we have to offer from our printing department. Bring your camera, printing, Photoshop or general photography questions. All visitors will receive a coupon sheet for special spring offers on printing and more! Invite your friends and family to come in!

I have been getting a lot of phone calls from different companies (today 2 from different companies selling the same thing) that I thought I would drop a quick alert about.  I know that one of the big groups that scammers will go after are photographers because we all want to get our name out there to sell our photos and they will push this fact.

Today the two companies were calling about my advertising with their on-line directories, only problem was that I do not advertise with any on-line directories.  They were both very slick calls;

Call 1

“Hi, I am phoning from 411.ca and would like to verify your listing with us, are you the person that can do this (then really quickly) and authorize an upgrade to your account?”

Call 2

“Hi, how are you today? (leaving no time for an answer – this is one way you can tell a solicitation) I am calling from Data on-line (I think this is what she said as she said it so fast I could not hear) and would like to take a few minutes to confirm your paid listing with us”

This is the time of year that scammers start pushing for victims.  In the last week I have had over a dozen calls all of which are selling me some great advertising deals that I have never heard of, or offering to get me first place rankings on GOOGLE (one even said when I challenged him that he was calling from GOOGLE), or offering you a GREAT deal on a website, 10 pages for only $75.00 with hosting and just about anything else I wanted to get me to say yes.  BEWARE these are scams, some sound great. One I got was from the Yellow Pages (who I do deal with) but they had no information about my account and kept telling me that they now take Visa & MC for my advertising and all I had to do was to give them my card number and I would get a great discount on a new ad program!

The worst one so far that I have heard of is a group out of the east that calls about a directory and they say nothing about a cost, just that they want to confirm your listing details.  When you do this a month later you will get a bill for a listing in a directory that you have never heard of.

My suggestion, if it is to good to be true, you did not call the company yourself, you cannot understand, etc.  Give out no information, not even your name – address or phone number, if they really know you then they know your information already.  Second – Ask to be removed from their call list then hang up without answering any questions.

I am a BIG advocate of using external hard drives to back-up your images and data. This is in addition to other back-up sources such as DVD’s and additional computers.

This past weekend, Boxing Day to be exact, I decided to brave the crowds and the fact that I am just getting over a stomach flu to head out and buy another external hard drive. Picked up a Lacie 1TB to transfer all my nature pictures to so that I would have them in one place and be able to take it with me when I am on the road. Spent Saturday night and part of Sunday transferring and organizing 200GB of data to the new drive. I have several other Lacie 1TB drives as back-ups and have had no problems to date. Then today (Tuesday) I loaded up the drive and took it to the studio to download the files there.

I plugged the drive into one of our computers and watched as it said “New Drive Detected”, “Installing Hardware”, “New Device is now ready to use”. Clicked on My Computer to find that the device is not there, tried second computer then a third, all with the same results.

I was able to locate the drive through a couple of backdoor routes and found that the drive was running, but after a lot of research I have found that even with the computer recognizing the drive it is not accessible to save or retrieve data from. In fact I have just found out after a lot more research that I will have to reformat the drive and start over. This is not something that I am looking forward to but it is not a huge problem as I just started using the drive and nothing is stored on the drive that I do not have other places, if this was a back up drive and I needed to retrieve the data from another computer I would be up the creek!

The problem is that when formatted on my Vista PC the format type is computer specific, exactly what an external hard drive should not be! Other computers can see the drive but it cannot be used by other computers.

So a word of warning, if you have an external drive that you are using for a back-up make sure that it is readable on other computers! You should do this ASAP!!! I would actually try several computers to make sure if your computer should die, or be upgraded and te operating system changed, that the external drive is accessible. I will try and get all the specifics as I go along this learning route and post the information here to let you know what to look for.

UPDATE 10:45pm – Well after a lot of time transferring files from the new drive to another hard drive I had some time to sit down and play sorry experiment. Started doing a lot more research on the Lacie site and BINGO, my brain kicked into gear. I remembered that on the last drive I bought I had the same problem and I called Lacie about it and they walked me through a number of steps to reformat the drive. Looked this up on the Lacie site and found it.

The problem is something called a GPT protective partition – it makes the hard drive specific to the computer that set it up (one tech states that it doesn’t make it computer specific just operating system specific, but many others are saying it is computer specific). Bad part is that you have no way of knowing this till you try it on other computers. From what I have read on a number of web sites is that this is a big problem for people with all types of drives (not just Lacie), worst is that many do not find out about it till they need to get data off on another computer and they cannot.  One site I visited had a number of IT guys ready to smash the drives as they could not get around this problem without reformatting the entire drive and loosing all the data.

Again as a word of warning, if you have an external drive check it on another computer ASAP to make sure that it can be read, before you need the drive to work and it doesn’t.

Many people have asked me to start a hints and suggestion area of my blog so here we go.  The first one is not going to be photography related as it just happened and is fresh in my mind.

Many will know how much I love Telus, have had great service over the years and am very happy with them for all my phones and Internet.  Well I was looking at my bill yesterday and saw that it had a feature that I was not using very much (okay not at all), called and asked about getting this feature changed.  Well it ends up that I can switch phone packages and save $20.00 per month and keep all the features that I need.  Then the customer service person says that they will upgrade my Internet to a package that is 4 times as fast and drop this price by $5.00 per month.  Then asked about my studio and the same thing with the Internet – upgrading it to a package that is 4 times as fast for the same price.

Funny thing is I was told a year ago that I was on the fastest plan available for both locations, how things change!

My point is take the time to look over your bills.  In the last two months I have now saves just about $100.00 per month by just calling and asking for a better plan or rate on different things from supplies, phone service, Internet service, cell phone and insurance policies.  Don’t think that you are getting the best deal or you even need to pay for something – ASK!